Great Catherine

by Erickson, Carolly, 1943-

  Yet if Favier looked unfavorably on Catherine's intellectual attitudes, he was quick to defend her character against the charge that because of her love affairs, she was a woman governed by her passions, and without moral integrity.

  "Her inclination to coquetry has also been exaggerated," Favier wrote. She was "a woman of feeling," with a yearning for love; she "yielded only to the inclination of the heart and, perhaps, the quite natural desire to have children."

  For a brief time in her early thirties Catherine's inclination toward motherhood was indulged. The empress allowed her to see her children once a week, and she made the journey from Oranienbaum to Petersburg regularly. Her baby daughter Anna Petrovna was still a gurgling, crowing infant, just beginning to crawl, when Catherine began her visits, and as the weeks passed she watched the baby learn to stand and then to take her first steps. Paul, a blond, brown-eyed child of four, was sickly when his mother first visited him, and notably undersized. No doubt Catherine could not look at him without being reminded of Saltykov, while baby Anna, daughter of the kinder and more devoted Poniatowski, aroused in her more pleasant, if sadly nostalgic, memories.

  Little Anna was never to grow up. Late in the winter she sickened, quite possibly a victim of freezing palace drafts, and in March of 1759 she died. No one recorded the nature of the illness, or whether her death was a quiet fading away or the result of prolonged suffering. Was Catherine permitted to stay with her little daughter in her last days or hours? We will never know. Catherine left no record of her feelings about losing her daughter; perhaps her silence is eloquent testimony to her grief. Infant death was an all-too-common tragedy in the mid-eighteenth century, and daughters were valued far less highly than sons. Still, it is hard to imagine that the tenderhearted Catherine was not saddened by her loss, and she must have felt bereft as she stood beside the small coffin and listened to the funeral prayers and the chanting of the monks.

  In those melancholy hours she must have felt keenly her son's precarious mortality as well. He was far from robust. Would he too die, depriving her of the all-important contribution she had made to the Romanov succession? If Paul were to die, Peter would have a plausible excuse for putting Catherine in a convent and marrying the younger, arguably more fertile Elizabeth Vorontzov.

  The Vorontzov fortunes were rising. Michael Vorontzov had replaced the exiled Bestuzhev as chancellor, and his niece Elizabeth had installed herself in Peter's apartments, giving herself airs and doing the honors as if she were already his wife. Catherine was aware that nothing pleased Peter and his mistress more than her own current state of disgrace, and that Peter felt confident that he could count on remarrying before long. Catherine referred to Elizabeth as "Madame Pompadour," a joking reference to the younger woman's quite serious and quite dangerous campaign to supplant her, as Pompadour had supplanted Louis XV's Queen.

  Once again the court was caught up in following the war. In the summer of 1759, the Russian army engaged the Prussians at Kunersdorf, only sixty miles east of Berlin. For twelve hours the massed ranks formed, stood and fired, receiving fire in their turn, hundreds of men falling with each volley. The sun beat down mercilessly on the smoke-filled battlefield, and the Prussians, outnumbered, numb with hunger and fatigue, began to abandon their ranks. Emperor Frederick himself took the field to rally them, knowing that the fate of his capital hung in the balance yet willing to risk all for the sake of victory. His heroism turned the tide for a time, but eventually the Prussians were routed.

  Stories of this victory made the rounds in Petersburg, and all the Russian regiments began to recruit more men. Winter closed in, the coldest winter in years. The Prussians, encamped in the snow and inadequately equipped, began to die of disease and hunger. Russia and her allies took heart. The final victory seemed close now. One more campaign and the Prussian menace would be quashed forever.

  When spring came a huge army of Russians, Austrians and French, nearly four hundred thousand in all, marched against the Prussian strongholds. All summer the grand assault was pressed. In October of 1760 Berlin fell to a dogged Russian attack, and although the Russians soon abandoned their prize, they held it long enough to ravage its defenses and plunder its arsenal, enriching themselves with a huge ransom from the terrified Berliners. Still Frederick refused to surrender, though his losses were monumental and the loyalty of his men was being tested almost beyond endurance. Another Prussian victory at Torgau in November was sobering to the allies, and both sides settled in for the long winter respite.

  Catherine, deeply engaged in her own fight for political survival, was preparing her defenses as best she could. While hoping against hope that the empress might cut Peter out of the succession and declare Paul her heir—with Catherine as regent—she built a new group of allies.

  To replace Bestuzhev as her political adviser she chose one of the ex-chancellor's proteges. Count Nikita Panin was a diplomat and a confirmed Anglophile like Catherine herself. Panin had broken with the pro-French policies of the Vorontzovs and Shu-valovs and was serving as tutor to young Paul. He was astute and capable, and Catherine came to believe that she could trust him. For several years she had had her eye on Panin as a candidate to join the new government when the empress died. Now she confided in him, and was gratified to discover in what contempt he held Peter and how eager he was to see a regency replace Elizabeth.

  Secret diplomatic approaches that would previously have been made through Bestuzhev now came to Catherine directly. Several European governments let the grand duchess know that they were prepared to lend financial backing to any plan to remove Peter from the succession. Russia's military allies, chiefly Austria and France, were alarmed at the possibility that the pro-Prussian Peter might come to the throne and immediately take Russia out of the war. They opened their treasuries to Catherine, and she gladly accepted what was offered, knowing she might need it quite soon.

  One unlikely ally joined Catherine, as it were, from the enemy camp. Peter's mistress Elizabeth Vorontzov had a younger sister, Catherine, married to a guards officer, Prince Dashkov. Catherine Dashkov had little in common with her brash, slatternly older sister save that she was rather plain. Like the grand duchess, whom she greatly admired, Princess Dashkov had a roving, curious mind and a thirst for new ideas. At the age of seventeen, when she began her friendship with Catherine, Princess Dashkov was the proud owner of one of the largest libraries in the capital and had read widely from the works of the French philosophes. It was no wonder Catherine enjoyed conversing with the precocious princess. Before long, she discovered that the idealistic Catherine Dashkov yearned to see her on the Russian throne and was working behind the scenes to gather support for her.

  Little by little, one by one, the roster of Catherine's supporters grew. A number of officers in the prestigious and strategically crucial guards regiments got word to her that they would support her should their loyalty be put to the test. Kiril Razumovsky, colonel of the Ismailovsky regiment, had told Catherine several years earlier that he would defend her "at the cost of his life" and that she had many other secret partisans who would do the same.

  That the guards regiments were the key military prop to the imperial court, Catherine well knew. No government could stand for long should these regiments revolt, nor could any attempted coup succeed if the Preobrazhensky, Semenovsky, and Ismailovsky regiments remained loyal to the emperor or empress.

  Everyone in the government knew the story of how Elizabeth's claims to her father's throne had been made good by the Petersburg guards regiments eighteen years earlier. On a bitterly cold December night in 1741 she had gone to the barracks of the Preobrazhensky Grenadiers. Beautiful in her courageous vulnerability, a leather cuirass around her slight shoulders and a Russian cross in her hand, Elizabeth had asked the men for their support against the regent Anna and her German ministers. With shouts and cries the soldiers had pledged her their undying loyalty, swearing that she deserved to reign as the wholly Russian daughter of Peter the Great. Eliza
beth led the men on to the Winter Palace, riding in a sledge over the crusted snow, and there she woke the regent and sent her and the baby Emperor Ivan to prison.

  The men of the Preobrazhensky regiment had created Elizabeth Empress. With their brother officers in the guards, they could do the same again—for Catherine.

  Gregory Orlov, the handsome hero of Zorndorf, was a lieutenant in the Ismailovsky guards. And he had four magnificent brothers: Ivan, Alexis, Feodor and Vladimir. All guardsmen. All outsize and fiercely strong. All respected leaders in their regiments, looked up to by the men and able to sway them politically.

  Nothing is known for certain about how Catherine and Gregory Orlov became lovers. She was an experienced woman of thirty, romantic and passionate, with pretensions to power yet handicapped by her gender and by the precarious state of her relations with her husband. She needed a man who would love her loyally and champion her cause. Orlov was a worldly, celebrated warrior of twenty-five whose rampant ardor expended itself in fighting, carousing and lovemaking. He was eager to advance himself, yet he lacked high birth, education, important connections at court. He needed an opportunity to make himself useful. Perhaps her passion ignited his ambition, or perhaps he loved Catherine as he had never loved before.

  All that is certain is that by the summer of 1761, with Prussia still undefeated and war losses mounting on both sides, with the empress locked in a macabre cycle of sinking into deathlike swoons and rallying to life mouthing curses at the hated Frederick, with Elizabeth Vorontzov counting the days until she became Peter's wife and Peter secretly passing on military information to the Prussians, Catherine became pregnant with Gregory Orlov's child.

  Their liaison was not common knowledge, and Catherine managed to conceal her pregnancy and to stay in the background as events unfolded in the fall.

  No one knew what the capricious empress would do next. Desperate to ensure a Russian victory over her arch-enemy of Prussia, she issued order after order to the army, changing generals, heaping abuse on anyone who got in her way.

  She could no longer stand; often she held her hand to her heart as if to still its erratic pounding. When she became excited, blood ran from her nose; her attendants kept lengths of linen ready to stanch the flow. A terrible sore that would not heal disfigured her left foot. The sore preoccupied her. She stared at it as if in a trance, muttering that it was a punishment from God, sent because her father, the Great Peter, had kissed her foot when she was a girl. Her mind at times seemed dormant, or lost in bizarre musings, yet time and again she roused herself from her mental lethargy and croaked out demands, orders, punishments.

  New fears grew in all those whose fortunes depended on the succession. What if the empress were to go mad? For a number of years she had been intrigued by madness, setting aside rooms in the palace where lunatics were kept and increasing her stock of demented men and women at frequent intervals. On one occasion, Catherine noted in her memoirs, twelve mad women were brought to court at once, perhaps because the empress felt compassion for them, more likely because their freakish behavior entertained her.

  Now there was a risk that Elizabeth herself might become as deranged as her pet lunatics. If she did, would Michael Vorontzov and his faction control her? Or could Peter manage to maneuver himself into power, as regent for his incapacitated aunt?

  October came, the cold weather set in and despite it, the newly appointed Russian general Buturlin sent thousands of Russian troops into battle against the Prussians. Buturlin had reason to hope that this campaign would be the final one. Large armies of Austrians and Swedes were joining with his Russians in this grand assault against an exhausted and disheartened Prussian foe.

  Prussia had been laid low by six years of warfare. Nearly half a million soldiers and civilians had died, out of a total population of less than five million. For every man who had died in battle or as a result of wounds, two more had succumbed in the suffering that followed the battles, with crops ruined, towns burned, trade destroyed. Every Prussian family was in mourning. There were no men left alive, apart from old men; boys of fourteen were being forced into the army to replace the fallen. The end could not be far off. Emperor Frederick, in great secrecy, had sent a message to the grand duke several months earlier; could he, in return for a bribe of two hundred thousand rubles, prevail upon his aunt the empress to make a separate peace with Prussia, and withdraw the Russian troops?

  Before Peter could send his answer a fresh wave of panic rippled outward from the imperial apartments. The empress had gone into convulsions. She was hemorrhaging. Doctors and priests surrounded her bed, the former shaking their heads funereally, the latter intoning the prayers for the dying. The last rites were administered by the empress's confessor who, though he had often before seen her in extremis, now felt certain that he was truly preparing his mistress for eternity.

  By an odd quirk of fate Peter Shuvalov too lapsed into the twilit world of the dying. His heart had failed, he lay pallid and unmoving on his silken coverlet, apparently senseless, his eyelids fluttering uselessly.

  It was mid-December. Thick snow fell from a dark sky, the Winter Palace was ablaze with candlelight even at midday. In the imperial apartments, servants came and went quietly, while prayers were offered for the salvation of Elizabeth's immortal soul. Catherine was among those who kept vigil, watching by the empress's bedside, aware of the old woman's labored breathing and of the gradual weakening of her useless body. No doubt she rehearsed in her mind the essential acts she must carry out when the empress died: to secure her children, to gather around her Gregory Orlov and his brothers and all those guardsmen sworn to keep her safe, and to protect herself, should the need arise, from Peter's vengeance. She had decided, given her pregnancy, not to go beyond this, not to heed the voices that urged her to take advantage of the empress's death to seize the throne for herself.

  Five days before Christmas Princess Dashkov came to Catherine in private and entreated her to lead her supporters in a coup. Catherine demurred.

  "Whatever happens," she told the princess, "I shall face it with courage."

  The princess was impatient. "Then your friends must act on your behalf," she said.

  "I beg you not to risk yourself for me," Catherine insisted. "Besides, what can anyone do?"

  With difficulty Catherine persuaded her supporters to restrain themselves. Even as she kept her deathbed vigil, she was interrupted by messages from those who wanted to see her proclaimed empress. She responded to all such messages with anxious negatives. "Don't lead us into anarchy!" was her urgent answer. Her best course, as she saw it, was to let Peter accede to power. Perhaps, after her child was born, when she was stronger and no longer vulnerable to the obvious charge that she was an adulteress and a traitor to the dynasty, she could make other plans.

  Elizabeth removed any remaining uncertainty about the succession when she summoned Peter and Catherine to her side and gave Peter a series of final instructions. As Catherine stood silently by, she heard the empress counsel her husband to let go of old resentments and start the new reign in a spirit of forgiveness. With tears in her eyes Elizabeth begged Peter to look after his little son Paul, and to show kindness to the servants she would soon be leaving behind in his care. It must have grieved her to hand on all that she had valued in life—her throne, her power, all those she loved—to the peculiar man who knelt beside her bed, stiff and without visible emotion, seemingly oblivious to the solemnity of the occasion. It must have grieved Catherine too to see them thus, aunt and nephew, the one still majestic even in her dying, the other stunted, half-formed, wooden. Hardly fit to become an emperor.

  Elizabeth had no final words for Catherine. She had always been envious of her niece, and this envy may have reared itself even in her final hours of life. She must have known, or sensed, that in handing her realm over to Peter she was in truth giving it to Catherine to govern, either in person or from behind the throne; it is possible that she deliberately snubbed Catherine in order to d
iscourage plotters. Did her weak old eyes detect the growing bulk under Catherine's full gown? If so, she said nothing. The light was fading. She had done all she could.

  Christmas morning dawned cold and clear. All over Petersburg, bells rang in celebration of the great church feast, and there was a further cause for rejoicing: word had arrived the evening before that the Russian army under Buturlin had captured the important Prussian fortresses of Schweidnitz and Kolberg. The war was all but won.

  Yet at the Winter Palace the rejoicings were muted. A crowd of courtiers had gathered outside the empress's bedroom, waiting for word of her condition. Elated as they were about the war news, they were apprehensive about the new regime that would soon begin. Would there be an attempt on the throne? Would Peter be able to assume power, and if he did, how would he govern? Would he put aside his wife?

  Hours passed, and no word came forth from the sickroom. The courtiers, weary of their vigil, watched the high carved double doors that led into the inner apartments. Finally, at four in the afternoon, the doors were opened and the dread announcement was made.

  "Her Imperial Majesty Elizaveta Petrovna has fallen asleep in the Lord. God preserve our gracious sovereign, Emperor Peter the Third."

  All in the assembled company fell to their knees, many weeping openly. Crossing themselves three times, they said their prayers, for the empress, and for her successor, and for the long-awaited return of peace.

  Chapter Sixteen

  CATHERINE KNELT AT THE FOOT OF THE EMPRESS'S BIER IN Kazan Cathedral, her body swathed in the heavy black of mourning, her face veiled. The hard, cold stones of the cathedral floor hurt her knees and her muscles were cramped and weary. Yet she stayed where she was hour after hour, keeping her head bowed, crossing herself, now and then lying prostrate in an apparent paroxysm of grief. These, she had been told, were the prescribed formalities of mourning to be observed by the wife of the new emperor, and she intended to carry them out to the letter.